#NOTINMYNAME: I’m powerless in the glow of computer screen photos of carnage almost a half a world away. As tents rise and fall, and cops rush in with guns and zip ties, confiscate the bullhorns and pad lock the university gates. // All we have are our voices, I think, and the dreams we carry of liberty and justice. But these are words and nothing more. Words, though, are what sparks the imagination, what ignite action. // In Rafah, it is bombs and soldiers who raze the tents. It is the refugees who cart their possessions from nowhere to nowhere, 1.5 million made homeless to appease a third for revenge. This war ceased being defensive the day it started. The day Israel’s leaders announced a total blockade, a willingness to flatten and empty the earth of 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. // I was brought up to believe Israel was always in the right, and so many still believe this. But 5,000 Gazans have been slaughtered every month for seven months, and rumors of ceasefire remain just rumors. This is not justice. This is not what Jews are supposed to believe. // Some approve. Some refuse to see Palestinians as people, as a people, displaced from their homes and cast into permanent refugee camps, into prisons overseen by the IDF, that offer the illusion of autonomy. One in four were in poverty before the war. Three in five are now, in a narrow strip of rubble, emptied of homes, of hospitals, of universities, roads. Of life. // Some see spoiled kids. Entitled kids. Some say shut up and study. What could these kids know of the world? Of power? And what right do they have to disrupt the workings of a system that views them as cogs? They have every right, and they are the ones who can fix what we have broken. // I am old now. I’ve allowed my words to stand in for political action, for political commitment. I’m still more observer than actor, and I’ve made peace with this. But these fights give me hope. Have altered my sense of what is possible. Of power. //
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